Last week I've tried to remove the "in memoriam" parts of the 9/11 pages by putting them on meta. This move was reverted (twice, I countered) by The Cunctator. However, I have not heard any _good_ arguments from him (or anybody else) for keeping them.
The arguments were:
* "I take it pretty personally" - Cunctator seemed to agree himself that this isn't a very good reason * "these are among the most popular pages on the site" - that is not a good reason. We are an encyclopedia, and no matter how many visitors we get for a page, if it's not an encyclopedia article, it must go. We could probably put some pornographic images here or music downloads - that would bring visitors - but they're not encyclopedia material.
Brion suggested that these could stay, provided a way was found to make them useful. I think that is impossible. "In memoriams" are by definition NPOV and do not provide any information useful for an encyclopedia.
Some have mentioned the pages should go to some special wiki - that's fine with me, but I *very strongly* feel they should leave Wikipedia now. The meta is the best place for them now. I've already brought this up some months ago, and I agreed then to wait until after September 11, 2002. It is now September 25, and time to move on with these pages - there has been plenty of time to think of other/better solutions. As I've said before, I don't think we should give 911 any special treatment anymore - there's no reason for that.
Jeronimo
Jeroen Heijmans wrote:
Last week I've tried to remove the "in memoriam" parts of the 9/11 pages by putting them on meta. This move was reverted (twice, I countered) by The Cunctator. However, I have not heard any _good_ arguments from him (or anybody else) for keeping them.
The arguments were:
- "I take it pretty personally" - Cunctator seemed to agree himself
that this isn't a very good reason
- "these are among the most popular pages on the site" - that is not a
good reason. We are an encyclopedia, and no matter how many visitors we get for a page, if it's not an encyclopedia article, it must go. We could probably put some pornographic images here or music downloads - that would bring visitors - but they're not encyclopedia material.
Some have mentioned the pages should go to some special wiki - that's fine with me, but I *very strongly* feel they should leave Wikipedia now. The meta is the best place for them now. I've already brought this up some months ago, and I agreed then to wait until after September 11, 2002. It is now September 25, and time to move on with these pages - there has been plenty of time to think of other/better solutions. As I've said before, I don't think we should give 911 any special treatment anymore - there's no reason for that.
I agree that most of these maudlin exercises should go elsewhere. We only need to keep whatever is there that is of true historical interest.. An appropriately place link to the sentimental material is all the reference we need to it.
The popularity argument is not a strong one. Unlike the major TV networks we do not need to appeal to the lowest common denominator just to appease advertisers.
The "/Donations" sub-page would be my first candidate for deletion. What business to we have encouraging donations to help people who have already been richly compensated? The amounts collected in respect of these about 3,000 victims are already many times what has been requested to help the millions that have been affected by the AIDS epidemic in Africa, yet these latter groups often cannot meet their funding targets.
Some of us are just plain tired of all this whining about 9/11.
Ec
I'm planning to re-organize and expand the Wikipedia FAQ. To avoid clogging up the mailing list, see the FAQ talk page (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_talk:FAQ) if you're interested in discussing or helping.
Stephen G.
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On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 18:49, Jeroen Heijmans wrote:
Last week I've tried to remove the "in memoriam" parts of the 9/11 pages by putting them on meta. This move was reverted (twice, I countered) by The Cunctator. However, I have not heard any _good_ arguments from him (or anybody else) for keeping them.
<snip very good argument>
I don't normally post "me too!"s, but in this case - 100% agreed.
In making statements about how much one should care about September 11, it's a good idea to remember that people had different experiences regarding it. That's all I'll say about that.
Now, on to action.
One: we're not actually talking about innumerable pages.
About the only page that is expressly not NPOV and can't be reasonably reconfigured as such is [[September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/In Memoriam]].
All tribute/comments for individual casualties have been moved to the Talk page for the individual, which while perhaps not perfect, is certainly within the scope of Talk (opinion which relates to and informs the entry).
Two: what to do? The best solution, as far as I can see it, is to have http://sep11.wikipedia.org/ set up with some version of the In Memoriam page as the homepage, and an automatic redirect from the www.wikipedia.org/ url to that.
About the only other pages sep11.wikipedia.org needs to contain (non-NPOV) are the tributes (note: not the biographical entries). Everything else should transparently link back to wikipedia.
If we can set it up cleanly it would be a good template for other projects.
I think there's a lot of good encyclopedia material in Cunc's 9/11 pages. I understand that it happened in your backyard, C., and so it hit you harder than a lot of people. I hope you don't take my comments badly.
My biggest concern about the collection of pages is that it shows a heavy American bias. The events of September 11, 2001 were tragic, but not unique. Atrocities are all too common in the world, and yet only 9/11 has a collection of memorial pages on Wikipedia.
I know that a counter-argument can be made that other people could put up other memorials, but I'm against that too. Memorials are not encyclopedia articles.
I think the pages should be moved to the meta and linked to from the main Sept. 11 page. I'm not in favour of "sept11.wikipedia.org"; the meta is where we post our personal materials. Another option would be a completely separate wiki with a non-Wikipedia domain name.
Stephen Gilbert
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